Are there any County Government workers out there? I have a few concerns I need to find answers for. I have been working for our local court house for a couple of months now. I am in this position "temporarily" because their normal IT guy is on active duty in Iraq. I went into this knowing I may be out of a job when he comes back (this has been estimated at Nov 05). Fine, I can handle having Government work on my resume, even if it is for a year or so. It started off well, a few servers, several departments to support, Citrix rollout, no problem. The one problem is the Board of Supervisors approved Citrix for everyone. I am now finding out that the department heads have the power to veto the use of Citrix in their departments. IT has NO say in what goes where, who gets what, etc. This is very disturbing to me strictly as a taxpayer, to know that elected officials have more say in what technology gets used than IT. Right now, none of the departments will play nice with each other. One department wants to look into document imaging, storing the docs on the server. This would work well for all departments. We could have one server store all the docs, seperated by folders with appropriate access and all would be good. Everyone else seems to think since the docs are on the same server that everyone would be able to view everyone elses docs. I've also got other departments that refuse to have a my documents redirect to the server for backup. The claim is "It's not secure". I feel like punching stupid people right now. After all the ranting, I'm wondering who has final say in a situation like this? The Board of Supervisors, Department Heads, Elected Officials? Are there any government sites I can look at that may have the info I'm looking for?

these issues are widespread in business and not isolated to "government"

many businesses have business operations management making IT decisions and don't let IT decide these type of issues

there is a decent chance that the next place you work (private business) will be just as F'ed up as what you are seeing in that county organization

get used to it or go into other work

there might be some places that do better than others, the place i work (for 6 years) is improving the IT/business relationship and gaining the trust of the operations/management side to let us help make some of those types of decisions, but stupid crap still happens

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“Sometimes the questions are complicated and the answers are simple.”
― Dr. Seuss

In my company we were forced to upgrade to Exchange Enterprise because upper management INSISTS on keeping every single thing they have ever sent/received in Exchange. We have people with 3-4 GB mail stores.

Absolutely asinine for a <50 person company to need Exchange Enterprise, but we have it.

Um, you act like they're anally raping you daily at work. It's not your place of business, that's how they run things. Things are pretty much NO different in the corporate world, depending on company. (At the one I'm at now, IT literally holds all the marbles in the company, so it's vice versa, but in other places I've been it's been just the opposite)

I probably forgot to mention this in my first post, but when I started working for my last employer (I'll call company A), a consulting company, the company I work for now (I'll call company B), was a customer. Company B decided to hire an internal IT support person to CONSOLIDATE all of their a) software, b) servers, c) purchasing department. That is when my predicessor was hired. When he got called off to active duty, I thought it would be a good time to seek another opportunity. I'm not complaining about my job, I just want some idea of a chain of command. I get contradicting information all of the time. One department wants this, the other wants that, consolidation was NOT accomplished, and nobody cares about all of this money being wasted for stuff they don't need. Not what I like to hear from a publicly funded local government.